This week on BSDNow, Allan is back in down from Europe! We’ll get to hear some of his wrap-up and get caught up on the latest BSD
This episode was brought to you by
Headlines
FreeBSD Quarterly Report
This quarterly status report starts with a rather interesting introduction by Warren BlockASLRPorting CEPH to FreeBSDRCTL I/O Rate LimitingThe Graphics Stack on FreeBSD (Haswell is in, work is progressing on the next update)CAM I/O SchedulerNFS Server updates, working around the 16 group limit, and implementing pNFS, allowing NFS to scale beyond a single serverStatic Analysis of the FreeBSD Kernel with PVS StudioPCI-express HotPlugGitLab Port committed!WITH_FAST_DEPEND and other improvements to the FreeBSD build systemLots of other interesting stuff***
A Prog By Any Other Name
Ted Unangst looks at what goes into the name of a program“Sometimes two similar programs are really the same program with two names. For example, grep and egrep are two commands that perform very similar functions and are therefore implemented as a single program. Running ls -i and observing the inode number of each file will reveal that there is only one file. Calling the program egrep is a shorthand for -E and does the same thing.”So BSD provides __progname in libc, so a program can tell what its name isBut, what if it has more than one name?“In fact, every program has three names: its name in the filesystem, the name it has been invoked with, and whatever it believes its own name to be.”Of course it is not that easy. “there’s another set of choices for each name, the full path and the basename”“It’s even possible on some systems for argv[0] to be NULL.”He then goes on to rename doas (the OpenBSD light replacement for sudo) to banana and discuss what happens“On that note, another possible bug is to realize that syslog by default uses progname. A user may be able to evade log monitoring by invoking doas with a different name. (Just fixed.)”Another interesting article from our friend Ted***
FreeBSD and NetBSD Google Summer of Code projects have been announced
Some FreeBSD highlights:Add SCSI passthrough to CTL (share an optical drive via iSCSI)Add USB target mode driver based on CTL (share a USB device via iSCSI)API to link created /dev entries to sysctl nodesImplement Ethernet Ring Protection Switching (ERPS)HD Audio device model in userspace for bhyveSome NetBSD highlights:Implement Ext4fs support in ReadOnly modeNPF and blacklistd web interfacePort U-Boot so it can be compiled on NetBSDSplit debug symbols for pkgsrc builds***
libressl - more vague priomises
We haven’t had a Ted U article on the show as of late, however this week we get several! In his next entry “LibreSSL, more vague promises”He then goes into some detail on what has happened with LibreSSL in the past while, as well as future plans going forward. “With an eye to the future, what new promises can we make? Some time ago I joked that we only promised to make a better TLS implementation, not a better TLS. Remains true, but fortunately there are people working on that, too. TLS 1.3 support is on the short term watchlist. The good news is we may be ahead of the game, having already removed compression. How much more work can there be?”“LibreSSL integrated the draft chacha20-poly1305 construction from BoringSSL. The IETF has since standardized a slightly different version because if it were the same it wouldn’t be different. Support for standard variant, and the beginning of deprecation for the existing code, should be landing very shortly. Incidentally, some people got bent out of shape because shipping chacha20 meant exposing non IANA approved numbers to Internet. No promises that won’t happen again.”***
Interview - Samy Al Bahra - @0xF390
Backtrace***
News Roundup
systrace(1) is removed for OpenBSD 6.0
OpenBSD has removed systrace, an older mechanism for limiting what syscalls an application can makeIt is mostly replaced by the pledge() systemOpenBSD was the first implementation, most others have been unmaintained for some timeThe last reported Linux version was for kernel 2.6.1NetBSD removed systrace in 2007***
pfSense Video Series: Comprehensive Guide To pfSense 2.3
A series of videos (11 so far), about pfSenseCovers Why you would use it, how to pick your hardware, and installationThen the series covers some networking basics, to make sure you are up to speed before configuring your pfSenseThen a comprehensive tour of the WebUIThen goes on to cover graphing, backing up and restoring configurationThere are also videos on running DHCP, NTP, and DNS servers***
DuckDuckGo announces its 2016 FOSS Donations
The theme is “raising the standard of trust online”Supported projects include:OpenBSD Foundation announces DuckDuckGo as a Gold Sponsorthe Freedom of the Press Foundation for SecureDropthe Freenet Projectthe CrypTech Projectthe Tor ProjectFight for the Future for Save SecurityOpen Source Technology Improvement Fund for VeraCrypt (based on TrueCrypt)Riseup Labs for LEAP (LEAP Encryption Access Project)GPGTools for GPGMail***
Larry the BSD Guy hangs up his hat at FOSS Force
After 15 years, Larry the BSD Guy has decided to hang it up, and walk into the sunset! (Figuratively of course)After wrapping up coverage of recent LinuxFest NorthWest (Which he didn’t attend), Larry has decided it’s time for a change and is giving up his column over at FOSS Force, as well as stepping away from all things technical. His last write-up is a good one, and he has some nice plugs for both Dru Lavigne and Michael Dexter of the BSD community. He will be missed, but we wish him all the luck with the future! He also puts out the plug that FOSS Force will be needing a new columnist in the near future, so if you are interested please let them know!***
Beastie Bits
If you sponsored “FreeBSD Mastery: Advanced ZFS”, check your mail box pkg-1.7.0 is an order of magnitude slower than pkg-1.6.4 -- Caused by a problem not in pkgLinuxFest Northwest 2016 Recap Dru Lavigne's 'Doc like an Egyption' talk from LFNW Michael Dexters' 'Switching to BSD from Linux' talk from LFNW Michael Dexters' 'Secrets to enduring user groups' talk from LFNW January issue of Freebsd Journal online for freeGhost BSD releases 10.3 Alpha1 for testing EuroBSDcon 2016 - Call for Papers - Dealine: May 8thKnoxBUG Initial Meeting Photos, slides, and videos from the Open Source Data Center Conference ***
Feedback/Questions
Mohammad - Replication John - Rolling new packages Clint - Unicast Bill - GhostBSD Charles - BSD Videos***
View all episodes
